Mobile devices such as smartphones, notebook and laptop computers, PDAs (personal digital assistants), tablet computing devices, and so forth, are extremely prolific, and are extensively used to provide convenient storage and/or printing of various documents and data. Such devices are able to store documents and data of the user, and allow the user to access and transmit the stored documents to networked document processing devices such as printers in many different locations.
Printers/multifunction-devices designed for use in a network environment routinely offer greater functionality than a simple desktop printer such as the printer can be managed, monitored, and configured directly from a standard web browser or any web-enabled application. Examples of network connected devices may include scanners, readers, fax machines, label makers, multifunction devices (MFD), or servers. When a user wishes to use one of the networked devices, a connection program may present the user with a list of all networked devices (such as printers) based on selection criteria provided by the user.
However, a mobile device may not be properly enabled to connect to a network device. One issue is that printers and mobile devices often reside on different networks. For instance, a mobile device can only print to a network printer when the mobile device and the printer are on the same network. There are many situations in which users may not know the identity of a network of the selected device and/or how to connect to the network in order to connect to the device and perform tasks. For example, a user may want to use a multifunction device via their mobile, over an enterprise WiFi network. However, there may be more than one network service set identifiers (SSIDs) visible to the user, and the user may not know which one to use in order to gain access to the selected device. Hence, ensuring that mobile devices have access to network devices and can find network devices on a local area network, particularly a local area network that includes several subnets and may include one or more wireless networks is difficult. Existing pairing solutions involving the use of NFC hotspots, passive NFC tags, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags or transmitters and so on are well-known, but do not solve this problem. Instead, such pairing solutions merely solve the problem of identifying the network address (IP or hostname) of the specific device in order to communicate with it, and do not address the problem of how one should connect to the surrounding enterprise network in order to be able to reach that specific device. Moreover, existing solutions increase administrative overhead in setting up information required for establishing connections, especially as it may change over time. The above problems may be exacerbated for network devices that are hard wired to a network and as such do not know the network topology of the network and/or the wireless network information.
The current disclosure discloses a system and method to automatically identify a network to use for connecting to a network device using historical data mining, and determine the network parameters for the identified network to establish a connection between a mobile device and the network device.